The wave of evictions sweeping through San Francisco during the past two years has taken a disproportionate toll on the elderly. Senior citizens accounted for one of every four tenants who lost apartments under the state's Ellis Act, a new study shows.

Most lived in their buildings for years and paid rents far below market rate, according to the survey of tenants evicted under the state law that allows landlords to drop out of the rental market and sell their buildings.

"I don't think we were surprised by the results so much as saddened," said Ted Gullicksen, head of the San Francisco Tenants Union, which conducted the study. Throughout the current housing crisis, the group has complained that elderly tenants were among the most likely to be squeezed out of the city by rising rents.

Using records from San Francisco's rent board, the union sent questionnaires to the 1,253 renters served with notices between the start of January 1999 and the end of January 2001. They reached 394 tenants, most of whom had already been forced to leave their apartments.

About 27 percent of those being evicted were seniors: age 60 and older. In contrast, seniors account for just 16 percent of all renters in the city, according to the 1990 census.

Teruko Kanba, 83, received her eviction notice last June. Under the Ellis Act, she has one year to find another place to live, and her time is now nearly up.

She knows she probably won't find anything as cheap as her current $500 rent. But it isn't just a question of money. Kanba has lived in her Baker Street flat for about 50 years. She used to share the place with her parents, and some of their furniture and keepsakes remain.

"I'm going have to either put some of it in storage or get rid of it," Kanba said. "It's really difficult for me to even think about it, but the reality is, I'll have to move."

The study may add ammunition to the Tenants Union's campaign for tighter legal controls on the sale of rental housing as "tenancies in common" or "TICs, " in which a group of people band together to buy a building. The law that protects seniors from eviction when their apartments are converted into condominiums does not apply to TICs. Nor does the city's annual limit on the number of apartments that can be sold as condominiums.

Proposed restrictions on TICs, however, face steady opposition from property owners. To protect elderly renters, they say, the city should lift the limit on condominium conversions, wiping out the incentive for selling buildings as TICs.

"If the immediate problem is that senior renters are being displaced by people purchasing units to live in, the way to stop that immediately is to lift the cap," said Janan New, executive director of the San Francisco Apartment Association.